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Sunday, December 31, 2006

PEACENIKS SAD

Alex Robson emails:

Damn you for mentioning Al Gore on your website again. My house was flooded tonight by a rain/hail storm in which an entire average month’s worth of rain fell in about 30 minutes. I may have to emigrate to Tuvalu.

That rain may have been Bob’s tears for Saddam (he previously was upset over damage to Saddam’s yacht). Also made weepy by Saddam’s execution is Melbourne leftoid Jeff Sparrow, currently organising a vigil in support of Jew-hating Taliban member and al-Qaeda trainee Mohammed Dawood.

NYE OPEN THREAD

WAN SMILE APPRECIATED

At least Saddam went out with dignity, reports respectful Robert Fisk:

All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the mass-murderer’s face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the noose.

BIN LADY

When the aptly named Jessica Root was 4 or 5 years old, her mother, Keli Solomon, took her to the Earth Day celebration in Central Park. In grade school, she dressed up for Halloween one year as a recycling bin.

That was only the beginning for Garbage Girl, who now works in TreeHugger.com’s elite video propaganda unit:

Root’s first project is a contest called Convenient Truths—a logical next step from Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.’’

What TreeHugger wants people to do is submit a one-minute to two-minute video showing how they’re reducing their own carbon footprint and thus slowing global warming ...

Root said the videos could be about something as small as carrying groceries in reusable cloth bags. They could also be about something as grand as an architect’s plans for a solar home.

"They could be about composting,’’ she said. “They could be about changing the filters in your air-conditioner.’’

They could be about alternative fuels; nitro-methane, for example. I might submit this, which demonstrates a DIY method of carbon wheelprint reduction.

YEAR OF MOTOONS

Internationally, the big news comes from Denmark, center of a mounting furor over some cartoons, published the previous year in a Danish newspaper, which depict a prophet whom, in the interest of not offending anybody, we will refer to as Fohammed. This upsets several million of the prophet’s followers, who request a formal apology from the newspaper, greater sensitivity to their religious beliefs, and, where necessary, beheadings. Eventually everybody realizes that the whole darned thing was just a silly misunderstanding.

Read whole thing; v. funny. In the Age, those Chaser fellows are also review-minded:

In Denmark, the Jyllands-Posten newspaper published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to explore the topic of censorship. It ended up proving censorship’s virtues when the Muslim world exploded in anger over the perceived blasphemy. The images were first published in Australia on Tim Blair’s blog; disappointingly, he was not among the casualties.

OWNERSHIP RETURNED

UPDATE. Caught in an error, Jeremy initially posts a correction (after prodding from his readers). Then he removes his correction and simply re-writes the post to cover his tracks. This guy could give lawyers a bad name ...

ISLAND BORN

Sure, it could lead to famine, extinctions and the submersion of much of Florida - but it’s great for Walt Parkin’s golf game.

"I love global warming,” Parkin, 56, of Whitehall, said Friday afternoon, at Moon Golf Club. Cars clogged the club’s four-row parking lot at 2 p.m. as Parkin packed up his clubs after playing 18 holes with friend Bob Stroup, 64, of Green Tree. Parkin said he usually stops golfing in October, but “I’ve gone out five or six times” since then this year.

HUNDREDS CHILLED

Over a year ahead of the nation’s first presidential primary, so many voters turned out Friday to hear Democratic hopeful John Edwards’ call for a new spirit of American activism on problems ranging from poverty to global warming that hundreds were left standing outside in freezing temperatures.

"TOO MANY RATS"

Rarely in our history has a federal government pursued such a high level of immigration as the Howard Government. Each year about 130,000 new migrants arrive on our shores and a third of them decide to settle in Sydney. The Government plans to increase the numbers.

The pressures from the influx are tempered by the efflux of thousands of Sydneysiders leaving the city each year, mostly heading north, driven out by declining amenity and house price inflation. The fact that John Howard, who has gained re-election by exploiting Hansonite xenophobia, has presided over a record inflow of foreigners is an irony little remarked ...

In the same sentence, speaking of irony, Hamilton condemns Howard’s “Hansonite xenophobia” then describes immigrants as “foreigners”. Worse, Hamilton actually wants Australia to adopt a “policy of zero net migration”, which puts him squarely in One Nation territory. Or beyond; imagine the outrage if Pauline Hanson ever linked immigration to sexually-abnormal rats:

A famous experiment in the 1960s found that when too many rats are forced to live in a cage of a given size they soon display abnormal behaviour including hyper-aggression, failure to nurture young normally, increased mortality, abnormal sexual patterns and infant cannibalism.

If guys like Hamilton can’t provide solutions beyond that of a depressing world view of locking down the city and the country and throwing away the key, they should shut the hell up and get out of the way.

Sydney’s Iraqi community erupted into celebration in Auburn the moment news broke that Saddam Hussein was dead.

Taxi driver Ayad Laftah, 37, of Yagoona, whose father and brother were killed under the dictator’s regime, burst into cries of “Allah Akbar”, waved his arms and threw sweets into the air.

Holding back tears he cried: “At last, justice for my father and brother."

Car horns rang out across Auburn as news spread.

"I had to grow up without my father because, one day in 1981, he just disappeared,” Mr Laftah said. “The same with my brother, Jewaad. He was just 21 ... To hear Saddam has been executed makes this the happiest day of my life."

Mr Laftah has been in Australia for 16 years after arriving as a refugee.

LANE NO TWAIN

Mark Twain, or someone else, once said: “We all grumble about the weather but nothing is done about it.” Which made us laugh because we knew then that nothing could be done about it. Well, it is no longer so funny. Now we know that there is something we can do about it ...

UNIDENTIFIED ISRAELI OBJECTS

Human Rights Watch finds Israel guilty of attacking two Lebanese ambulances (please read the whole thing; my takes on this case may be accessed here). Problem is, as even HRW admits, the evidence for their finding is a little scant:

HRW cannot conclusively state which missiles were used in the attack on the ambulances, because our researchers did not find diagnostic shrapnel or missile parts at the scene, and because of the experimental nature of some missiles used by the IDF.

QUOTE SEASON CONTINUES VII

Failing to warn the citizens of a looming weapon of mass destruction — and that’s what global warming is — in order to protect oil company profits, well, that fits for me the definition of treason.

And from NBC’s Matt Lauer:

Earth’s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives ...The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home.